he words to describe, Mrs. Samstag, with that dreadful dew of her
sweat constantly out over her, lay with her twisted lips to the faint
perfume of that fan of Alma's flowing hair her toes curling in and out.
Out and in. Toward morning she slept. Actually, sweetly and deeply as if
she could never have done with deep draughts of it.

She awoke to the brief patch of sunlight that smiled into their
apartment for about eight minutes of each forenoon.

Alma was at the pretty chore of lifting the trays from a hamper of
roses. She places a shower of them on her mother's coverlet with a kiss,
a deeper and dearer one somehow, this morning.

There was a card and Mrs. Samstag read it and laughed:

Good morning, Carrie.

Louis.

They seemed to her, poor dear, these roses, to be pink with the glory of
the coming of the dawn.

* * * * *

On the spur of the moment and because the same precipitate decisions
that determined Louis Latz's successes in Wall Street determined him
here, they were married the following Thursday in Greenwich,
Connecticut, without even allowing Carrie time for the blue twill
traveling suit. She wore her brown velvet instead, looking quite modish,
and a sable wrap, gift of the groom, lending genuine magnificence.

Alma was there, of course, in a beautiful fox scarf, also gift of the
groom, and locked in a white kind of tensity that made her seem more
than ever like a little white flower to Leo Friedlander, the sole other
attendant, and who during the ceremony yearned at her with his gaze. But
her eyes were squeezed tight against his, as if to forbid herself the
consciousness that life seemed suddenly so richly sweet to her--oh, so
richly sweet!

There was a time during the first months of the married life of Louis
and Carrie Latz, when it seemed to Alma, who in the sanctity of her
lovely little ivory bedroom all appointed in rose-enamel toilet trifles,
could be prayerful with the peace of it, that the old Carrie, who could
come pale and terrible out of her drugged nights, belonged to some
grimacing and chimeric past. A dead past that had buried its dead and
its hatchet.

There had been a month at Hot Springs in the wintergreen heart of
Virginia, and whatever Louis may have felt in his heart, of his right to
the privacy of these honeymoon days, was carefully belied on his lips,
and at Alma's depriving him now and then of his wife's company, packing
her off